Recently, the Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG) announced plans to focus its work around four key industry topics, while continuing the development of the organization.

The industry/technical topics represent the most prevalent and urgent topics related to messaging, Internet use and cybersecurity. Complementary industry groups worldwide, as well as government agencies, are tackling the same topics, and we intend our work to provide members and ultimately users with prescriptive guidance and education around these topics.

The focus areas will align the efforts of M3AAWG’s committees, special interest groups and partnerships, as well as identification and growth of new initiatives.

The shift is intended to create more inclusive collaboration across the organization's committees and SIGs to create a more comprehensive industry view and diverse perspective. In addition, M3AAWG will continue its ongoing work with external global partners and contributors.

Specifically, the focus areas include:

• Readiness: shift to be proactive to identify emerging threats, focus on prevention/mitigation/detection and deprecate older technologies
• Data and identity protection: protect online identity (ex. use of multi-factor authentication), ensure data privacy and security through use of encryption/encrypted protocols, adopt zero trust principles that assume requests are breaches, must be verified explicitly and are using least privileges to help mitigate
• Communications: protect network, messaging, mobile and IoT communications/systems/devices from malware, spam, phishing, DDoS and DNS attacks
• Supply chain: understand downstream dependencies and risk, incorporate secure software development/testing practices and proactively monitor and detect and manage vulnerabilities
• Organization: continue efforts to strengthen and build the organization, which is largely comprised of volunteers, via its diversity and inclusion efforts and global outreach and partner organizations

For more info, see https://www.m3aawg.org/news/messaging-malware-and-mobile-anti-abuse-working-group-announces-updated-organizational